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SANFERMINBOOK

SANFERMIN 3

All rivers flow eventually to the sea. In the culminating volume of SanFermin 3 long drowned strands of the saga rise at last to the surface. Lives take new bearings. Gates open to unexpected avenues: the worlds of politics, television and accidental media fame. Prisoners are freed; children are born; the Camino continually beckons. Time and change are more and more to be reckoned with. For the bulls keep their same speed forever while each year the runners lose a step.

In a post cold war 21st century world the stakes are complicated. Many of the habituals find themselves directly engaged in the fall out of both man made conflicts and natural calamities. From the sunken wrecks of Bikini Atoll to the ruins of Belchite. From the Towers to Katrina. Journeys and escapes from Iran to Afghanistan. From abandoned ghost towns in the Inyo range to a boat stranded on the immense Pacific. Revisiting old haunts to wind back the clock. Rekindling old embers in order to alter the old outcomes and perhaps come to different answers.

Scanning the past to make sense of the present, the narrative weaves and shuttles from the early 50’s to the late 60’s and onwards to the challenges of a remorselessly altering world. The threats of terrorism abroad and at home. The speedily expanding web of the Internet, smart phones and drone surveillance. Navigating through the multiplying and unseen consequences. Trying to chart voyages into the future. Clinging on. Letting go.

Through it all, as the cuadrilla hold to the lifeline of fiesta, San Fermin keeps the covenant. The wheel still turns. The tales get told. As some leave the stage, new faces appear. The dance goes on. Giants still waltz and bulls still run in the streets as they did before the wondering eyes of a young American writer all those years ago.

SANFERMIN 2

Widening its river banks, expanding its range, the roman fleuve of SanFermin 2 races on in full torrent. Change is coming to the cuadrilla. And, as Spain plunges feverishly into the modern world, change is coming to San Fermin. Mushrooming television coverage. The movies and the admen arrive. Balconies start being rented to view the bullrun. The local cartoon T shirts are on every back and marketed in every shop window. The systematic selling of the fiesta has begun.

For the habituals, the fiesta more and more immerses them in a Proustian memory palace that balances and contrasts past history and their present actions. As the cuadrilla become more deeply involved with the Navarrans of Pamplona and the pueblos, some find themselves eyewitnesses to history, swept up in the large events unfolding over the last decade and a half of the 20th century.

Israel, India, Egypt, Iran, and Africa. From the Berlin Wall to the Gulf War. Speculation in Silicon Valley. Midnight assignations in a Paris cemetery. Chasing opals and legends in Mexico. Dead men tell tales. Skeletons begin to escape their closets. Past and present coexisting, coiling upon each other as the end of the century and the new millennium loom into view.

New faces step up to join the dance. Tragedies and triumphs occur. Warriors fall. The inevitable changing of the guard. Unknown accounts of Hemingway surface. Marceliano’s closes its doors. Death comes to the encierro for the first time in 15 years. The first foreigner to die. An American…

SANFERMIN 1

They come to run, to remind themselves they are alive, to exorcize the demons of the past twelve months, to show off, get laid, get drunk, play pranks, join the dance….

Each July where the old pilgrim road to Santiago descends from the Pyrenees, the Navarran town of Pamplona explodes into a nine-day fiesta unlike any other on earth. Yearly, hordes of unlikely characters from all corners of the globe dream of their rendezvous with San Fermin and its rite of encierro: eight mornings of running the fighting bulls of Spain.

A saga of great energy, color and sweep, SanFermin 1 (the first of a trilogy) sets the legendary fiesta made famous by Hemingway at the heart of a vast canvas ranging over world events across forty years and many countries. Through the eyes of a Tolstoyan cast of oilmen, philosophers, spies, lawyers, veterans, artists, reporters, flyboys, aid workers, backpackers and millionaires, the reader is drawn into an exhilarating and unpredictable world of quixotic personalities, mavericks and cockeyed oddballs from everywhere, all the lost boys of summer and their ladies chasing the mortal dream of passion, danger and fiesta – that heady drug unique to Spain.

This novel is their story. An epic of intertwined fortunes, friendships, romances and rivalries stretching over continents and generations from Nam to 9/11 and beyond. 1001 days and nights of tales, sacred and profane, woven into the tapestry of a place where people waltz with giants, race in company with primeval beasts and hunt the elusive spoor of Hemingway’s ghost and all the others who danced in these eternal streets.